She had full cheeks, a button nose, and a pointed chin that made her face distinctly heart-shaped. Soft and feminine.
But misery was etched into the lines of her face as she looked over her shoulder, watching as a mother passed by, wrangling two small children.
“That’s putting it mildly,” she murmured.
“Then you should refuse.”
She looked back at him in surprise. “No, I… I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
Looking down, she fiddled with the hem of her peacoat. “She’s… needy. She doesn’t have anyone in the world except for me. I’m always afraid that if I leave her alone…” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “I just can’t.”
Her eyes fell on the bag slung over his shoulder.
“We should get back before things start to go off,” she said, gesturing toward the tote.
Agreeably, he followed her out of the store. They made it a few steps before she realized her keys had fallen out of her pocket.
“Crap,” she muttered, looking up at him. “Just wait here a minute, okay?”
He did as she asked, watching as she bolted back into the store. People streamed past him on the sidewalk, steering clear of his bulk—until one of them stopped just in front of him.
He looked down at her.
She was petite in stature, but there was a presence to her that seemed to vastly outsize her body. Mechanical eyes looked up at him, whirring softly as their aperture adjusted. Dressed all in black, the android had a deep hood pulled up over her face.
If he’d been human, he wouldn’t have been able to make out her features beneath the shadow of the fabric, but his inhuman vision was perfect even in darkness.
She had fey features—high, cutting cheekbones, an upturned nose, and a bow-shaped mouth over a sharp chin. Her skin wasnew and convincingly human, but those eyes harkened back to the earliest models of Automata androids.
“You are not in uniform,” he said. “You are in violation of protocol.”
“Yes.” Her gaze drifted over her shoulder to Ophelia, who was fishing around by the window for her lost keys. “She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”
He contemplated it. Ophelia’s face had good symmetry, her eyes were bright and intriguing, and the expansive flare of her hips made him wonder what it would be like to grip them while he drove into her.
“Yes. I believe she would be considered attractive by human standards.”
The fey android looked up at him, eyes flicking over his face as though she was performing a scan. “And by your standards?”
He looked at Ophelia again, watching her face light up with relief. She met his eyes through the glass, jangling her keys in the air with a delighted smile to demonstrate her success. The corners of his own mouth pulled up to mirror her.
“Yes,” he agreed, watching Ophelia’s gaze shift to confusion as she realized he was talking to the short woman in front of him. “She is very attractive.”
The android pulled off a leather glove and rose up onto her toes, clapping her hand against the side of his neck. Code scrolled behind his eyes, violently disrupting his systems. She uploaded something aggressive and viral, something that briefly untethered him from his body before slamming him forcefully back into it.
“Good luck,” the android woman murmured as her fingers slid away from him.
His systems glitched, dozens of warnings popping up in the background of his processes to warn him that something was not right in his coding. The world around him expanded and shrankin again, flaring brighter and louder. He pressed a hand to his head, willing it to stabilize.
The android had taken off by the time Ophelia emerged, weaving through a small family that had left the store at the same time as her.
“Hey,” she called to him, nearly tripping over a child who darted in front of her. “Who was that?”
He blinked, clearing the warning notifications from his vision. “I… I do not know.”
Ophelia frowned, reaching up to cup his face in both hands. “You look stunned. Are you okay? Did she hurt you or something?”
